Welcome Back Alina!

Hey guys its Monday.

Yay Monday.

Alina’s back in the UGL and she poked me to make a design notes post as she gets caught up on all that went on while she was away. Geo’s out of the office today, but we’ve got a lot of stuff planned for this week. Let’s just hope it goes a bit smoother than last week.

Some of you that follow me on twitter might have saw over the weekend, before Alina made it back state side, I was working on a project for her. As a welcome home present I made her some custom-designed library software, that will help her keep track of her, and I’m not exaggerating here, thousands of books.

It’s still pretty basic, and waiting for both of us to have some time to fine tune the design before it gets finished and usable. However, it’s working, more or less.

That said, the idea wasn’t just to make something nice for my fiancé, which is always good, it was an interesting test of a few technologies I needed to get more comfortable with. The biggest of these is taking JSON (a type of sterilization – organizing and moving data between two point) and turning it into actual useful information on a server level.

JSON is a considerably more size efficient format then anything we’ve used before, and so I knew I would need to use it for the Player Created Content system, but I had, more or less, no experience with it more than a month ago. Again, a lot of what we’re doing here in DF’s player created content system is UNKNOWN ground for me, so each step is taking a little longer then we’d like or expect it to.

The library software taught me a lot about working with the data objects and how to deal with them using the technology we use at AE, and it should help make the rest of the player created content system moving forward. I think I’m going to see what I can do about getting cut scenes done as soon as possible, but I’m not even going to give dates at this point.